President/CEO Nelson Baker tells ResourceClips.com, “We’d been looking at the area since 2006 when we acquired the Straw Lake project. We liked the area because it’s at the intersection of three major regional breaks or faults. Within that area, our property package consists of an area four kilometres wide by eleven kilometres long. It hosts three different styles of gold mineralization. One is the mine horizon, which is typically a Red Lake or Kirkland Lake-style gold occurrence, where you tend to get high grade. Straw Lake was mined between 1938 and 1941. The old-timers went down on a vertical shear zone that was about a metre wide, and the grades were quite high—anywhere between 0.35 ounces per ton to 0.4 ounces per ton—so the miners focused on that one-metre zone. They put a shaft down to 723 feet and established several levels, and they started production on the first couple of levels. About that time, they needed to get extra electrical power to go deeper with their mining operations, and the Second World War broke out, so they had to stop mining.

It’s early stages yet, but we’re really optimistic that with aggressive drilling, we can define a high-grade resource.—Nelson Baker

“What we liked about that horizon,” Baker continues, “is that it had a lot of similarities to the Hemlo deposit to the east of Thunder Bay. The Hemlo deposit’s a classic one—where it occurs in a sericite schist—and the geology here is very similar. In addition to that, there’s another gold-style occurrence, called the Pine Centre gold mineralization. It’s in a granodiorite which, geologically, is quite similar to the Hammond Reef deposit in Atikokan. Hammond Reef is now owned by Osisko Exploration Ltd TSX:OSK, and their latest resource estimate was 6.7 million ounces gold [at a 0.3 g/t cut-off]. We see a similar potential in the Pine Centre zone here on the Straw Lake property. It’s a shear zone that’s several kilometres long. We’ve now been drill-testing it for about 400 metres, and we’ve got several holes into it.

“The release we put out today had a high-grade intersection of 45.9 g/t gold over 1.4 metres. That’s a classic Red-Lake style gold value. We’re right on a major structure. It’s early stages yet, but we’re really optimistic that with aggressive drilling, we can define a high-grade resource. The resource estimate wouldn’t come until 1Q 2012.”

Baker concludes, “The Pine Centre comes up to surface; there’s no stripping ratio, and the holes are all shallow. We knock off a drill hole a day, so it is really quick to advance the project. Look for frequent, timely news releases on that. I feel that we have an above-average chance of defining a substantial gold resource on the property.”